treating the subject of Industrial Arts in this way is also quoted (Third Yearbook, page 336).

Art.-The studies here deal principally with the educability of pupils in drawing, indicating, for example, that high intelligence is not a prerequisite; but that some factors of general intelligence are requisite. A study of children's preferences for pictures indicates that "children like pictures in which there are a few easily distinguished objects in the foreground." (III-345.)

Music. Three points stand out in this report: First, the explanation of the Seashore and Revesz prognosis tests of musical ability; second, the findings which indicate that rhythm capacity is innate and cannot be developed to any extent; and third, the explanation of the Kwalwasser-Ruch musical accomplishment test. Exposition is also made of seven of the definite attainment standards recommended for 6th grade achievement by the Music Supervisors' National Conference of 1921.

III. Teaching Methods

Aims.-Educational leaders are agreed that the first step in any intelligent program

of curriculum revision is a clear definition

of aims. It is also pretty generally asserted that the educator has not been, in the past, any too cognizant of his aims. In the

Second Yearbook reference is made to several school systems which have undertaken to re-determine the fundamental aims of education. I say re-determine because it seems to the writer that the seven fundamental aims enunciated by the National Education Association in 19182 -the same being the work of several committees of nationally known educators working through a period of more than seven years cover the entire field of public education most satisfactorily. The writer has not seen a set of aims worked out by any set of investigators since 1918 which cannot easily be translated into terms of the seven

cardinal aims, without loss. Therefore the efficient move now seems to be that suggested on page 11 of the Third Yearbook namely to try to get our curricula into line with these known aims.

Individual and Community Needs.-The problem here centers about ability grouping and the determination of minimum essentials for the slow pupil and enrichment of curriculum for the fast, also brief mention is made of the Winnetka plan of individual promotions. Recognition of community needs seems to begin with the community survey.

Directed Study.-Here it seems that the "natural" methods of the exceptionally fine teacher need to be analyzed and codified for general use. Also it needs a more definite emphasis in the time schedule.

Faculty Coöperative Study.-This is but a part of the general movement in the advance of professional standards. Professional leadership on the part of principal and superintendent seem to be the big motivations here.

Recognition of the Child's Social Age.—It ought by this time to be an educational truism that every child has at least four social-and any pupil placement plan which "ages"-chronological, mental, physical and ignores any one of these factors is defective.

lowing quotation from Otis W. Caldwell, p. Development of Child-Leadership.-The following quotation from Otis W. Caldwell, p. 103, Second Yearbook, indicates the problem: "The subjects should be organized and used so that pupils may teach one another. Education has never made adequate use of the fact that children learn much from one another, and our present subject organization does not favor such mutual teaching.

The topics and content of studies should be such that pupils can come into mutual and coöperative mastery of them."

Character Education.-We need to develop more definite, conscious, direct approaches toward character development; rather than to fall back upon the incidental work of the past. The Fourth Yearbook promises some studies along this line. The American Social Hygiene Association is making at least one advance (and undoubtedly many

more) when it shows the teaching profession how matters of sex education may be discussed, frankly, definitely, and fearlessly even in mixed audiences; and how these topics may be likewise handled with children.

IV. Mechanical Structure of Education

School Organization.-The Dalton and Winnetka plans seem to be about the only variations from the traditional one-teacher plan (including the prevailing plan of itinerant teachers of special subjects). The Winnetka plan of individual promotion is certainly a mighty challenge to the mind of every educator who lays any claim to being progressive.

Time Distribution.-The study of time allotments in the various subjects throughout our country seems already to have been made so thoroughly that it is now necessary only for the curriculum maker to look these digests over and take his

choice. While, as previously indicated, there is a general uniformity of subject heads, there seems to be no end, in the matter of time allotments, to that infiniteand I think I may say permissible-variety of which the American is so fond.

Conclusion

The curriculum revision movement represents, then, a nation-wide, centrally directed, check-up on existing educational practices, plus a systematic effort toward improvement supported by scientific research. In the present field of investigation, namely the elementary, there is thus far no indication of there being any very revolutionary transformations in either subjects methods. The results are far more likely to be expressed in terms of those evolutionary processes which ever follow in the wake of the progressive leader and which manifest themselves in the quiet translation of the very-good into the excellent.

or

IN

'N THE Atlantic, George W. Alger discusses the modern condition of mass leisure, and asks "for what?" What the sociologist terms "The Industrial Revolution," with its resulting high wages, greatly increased family and individual purchasing power, and release of human energy in hours of undirected and undigested leisure, spells to him a very questionable finis for the boasted superiority of the American of Nordic blood. He hints that this is the great vital problem facing education in America to-day, and, as it is faced and solved wisely, most of the social,

economic, and ethical problems of the day and age will be automatically solved as well.

The above author states that education has not yet recognized the need to develop the capacity of the individual to be happy, and that even the needs of such a system are not yet understood. Such generalizations as this intensely interesting article give are easy to make. In fact the tendency to sit at the typewriter and make them cover all the criminal and evil tendencies of our modern life, and then to call for a "survey of leisure" to secure detailed information for education to go to work on, is rather

begging the question. For if one takes the trouble to look over the technical journals which are the mouth-pieces of the teachers of the schools and colleges of this country, one will be surprised to see what a large percentage of the space of the Journal of the American Educational Association, the EDUCATIONAL REVIEW, and others of like standing, are earnestly devoted to just this problem. Educationally the problem is usually stated as "Education for Citizenship," or "How to Socialize Our Educational Work for the Youth?"

The tendency to take a pessimistic view of the present hour in history is a natural and very human trait. If any one of us had the privilege of recreating the laws of life for the earth, there is no doubt that the adult "creator" would include a law that would provide for the inheritance of parental experience by the new-born child. This one law would simplify all the knotty educational problems that the adult man has to face to-day in his pitiful efforts to give his sons and daughters a fairer start in life than he himself enjoyed. Collier's Weekly printed a special article recently entitled "What Has Become of the Reds of Yesteryear?" Specific instances were given to show the tendency of violent youth to settle down and become law abiding and respectable with age and parental responsibility. Somewhere also was printed recently a comment on the earliest clay tablet of Ptah Hotep, some 2500 years before Christ, in which the scribe recorded a lament on the "decadence of the times in which we live." He was probably quite right, too, for we now have only such faint traces of the civilization of that ancient Persia as survive in the clay tablets of its ruins.

We are living in a material age, and not one of us hundred and ten millions who has intelligence enough to form sound judgment at all, but recognizes this fact. We may not like it, we may not believe in it, and we may bemoan the penalties that go with materialism for the man who yet maintains an individual conscience in vigorous working order. Yet we may travel the

broad highway with wide open eyes, for another thing on which practically all are agreed is that we, as a race or as a group, never intend to go back to the hard living conditions of the "Golden Age" of our forefathers. The die is already cast and the mold is destroyed. Our main daily individual problem is how to inject more speed into our own family bus to keep within reasonable hailing distance of the procession. There is another determined tendency in American educational circles to-day, and that is the recognition of the fact that the word "education" has been limited too generally to the specific days and years given over to our systematized educational institutions. The determination to do something about it is evidenced by the generous "extension departments" of our Universities, as well as the rather haphazard selfhelp business of the correspondence schools with their commercial taint. The significant thing in all this is that the general public is supporting and trying to utilize these sources of self education. It would take a dark browed pessimist indeed who could not see the significance of the general adult desire to acquire knowledge. It is certain that nothing like it has ever before been seen in the recorded history of this world.

This eager hunger for knowledge which supports billions of dollars of capital invested in publications of every possible sort and complexion, to say nothing of the educational system supported by public taxation, is the optimist's answer to the warning that our civilization shows the same germs of decay that history records in times past where material wealth produced a great leisure ruling class and coincident general moral disintegration of the submerged masses. At least we must grant that the MECHANISMS for giving a worth-while aim in life, for directing and enlightening the point of view of the individual, for creating worthy ideals in the hearts and minds of men, are the compensating mechanical elements in the answer to the educational problem. We may even rely upon history

of fallen civilizations of the past to know that life itself cannot be cut short on the earth as long as soil and sun and rain will maintain it. If our control of social control of social mechanisms is doomed to be destroyed by the results of our own ignorance we may be sure that we will be followed by some group who will take up the "white man's burden."

We hear exactly the same complaint from the Fundamentalist in religion, a constant pulpit lament that the modern church is losing its historic power over the hearts and minds and conduct of men. This complaint is usually directed most emphatically against the younger generation. This phrase," younger generation," is also handled and bandied about in a most peculiar fashion. One would think to hear it and read it in its daily appearances that each generation of thirty or forty years was followed by the succeeding one just emerging from its teens. This is a physiologic, as well as a sociologic, misconception. Our understudy is always crowding hard on the job we are holding down, waiting eagerly for a warm chimney. seat to claim the old fogey, who is forever holding up real speedy progress. Human nature is the same to-day as it was when it appeared in the time of the Egyptian Pharaoh who first evolved the scheme of building a pyramid in the Valley of the Nile to protect his bones from his heirs.

Youth is forever eager to shove age off the scene, and age is forever fighting to hold possession of to-day for to-morrow's harvest. Fundamentalism is to-day fighting for creation according to Genesis; for a literal interpretation of the miracles, including Jonah's three days' sojourn in the gastric juices of a living whale; for the Virgin birth to explain the power and moral beauty of Christ; for His resurrection and second coming in a physical body somehow made immortal, all this, to conserve and regenerate altruism for to-morrow's needs. We do not see that He, who regards the sparrow's fall, must have indeed foreseen our to-morrows for us. And if the whole universe is, after all, just a materialistic

accident, we still have just this present day to do with as we will. Yesterday is already a part of history, and to-morrow we may not be here. To-day we may direct our works with logic, with wisdom, with intelligence, or with heedless foolishness-the choice is a personal one for which each one is personally responsible. The burden cannot be put off on to the shoulders of the family or any other social group however large or small. The result of our daily living, our thinking, and our doing, is a character by which and for which, we must stand in the judgment of men and in the judgment of God just so surely as there be one.

It is very true that the only way in which we to-day may guard and guide the character of to-morrow's manhood is by to-day's education of our children just so long as they are under our authority. But we should not forget that it is just a point of view that we are fighting for so strenuously. Human nature is to-day what the appetites and senses of the physical body has made it together with the mental memory reactions we have gotten from the lessons of past experience in their satisfaction. Therefore human nature does not change from age to age, it is the same to-day as it was ten thousand or ten million years ago on this physical earth. It is reasonable to suppose that it will be much the same to-morrow. In other words it is the thinking of to-day with its resulting action that constitutes the chief problem of education.

During the World War we had a tremendous object lesson in what modern social organization can do to coalesce and direct public opinion to one great willing, fighting, and hoping purpose. So overwhelming was this demonstration that most of us believed that the great idealistic definition of human brotherhood was becoming a working reality for this, our day and our age. In the disappointment of the reaction the pendulum has swung to the other extreme to where many of us see only the blackest side of the picture, and forget that reaction, in the human heart as in physics, is always equal to action and in the

opposite direction. Basic human nature has not changed, and cannot change save by a slow process of social evolution over the course of countless ages. The lesson of those War years is still vital and just as safe to base to-morrow's intelligent plans upon as are the disappointing lessons of the years that intervene.

The successful educator to-day must be an intelligent optimist. And why shouldn't he be? His daily task all his life long lies with the young heart and young brain, the living fount of all optimism! He sees in the past a clear demonstration in human history of the two great streams of social forces, dark selfishness and altruistic love working on the human heart and character ever since Man became an upright and consciously articulate animal. He puts no time limit on evolution in the upward course of this history. He sees the rise and fall of nations as but incidents in this slow development. He sees in this past a sees in this past a fundamental difference in the conception of the inherent right to personal knowledge, from that of our own day. Then, knowledge was the rightful possession of the few and ignorance the portion of the many. To-day the right to know is just as inalienable as the right of possession of property, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. He sees fermenting all through the social mixture to-day an urgent sense of responsibility in the wisely knowing ones to pass on true knowledge to all who are willing to listen and to learn.

So urgent is this sense of responsibility to-day that we are making the mistake of legislating in behalf of the quicker diffusion of knowledge. This is a mistake of the Elders under the urge to protect and guide Youth in its heedless years. But appetite for knowledge cannot be legislated into the mind any more than can appetite for strong drink be legislated out of the physical body. A colt beside a roaring railroad train, under urge of whip and rein can be forced to the water trough, but no external force can make him drink until his quivering nerves have stopped their explosive control of his

consciousness. In this radio, moving picture, jazz-crazed day it takes something more than legislation by our Elder Statesmen to do more than lead the youth and maid to the trough of knowledge. Knowledge of self in just relation to the social group, a desire for true knowledge for its character value to that self must be acquired by the youth before education for better citizenship has much chance to gather a harvest.

This is the first step in the solution of the educational problem. Its solution is the great disputed question in the minds, hearts, pens, and voices of the leaders of education to-day. We know that knowledge of truth shall set us free. We know that sane human nature in America to-day is just the same mind stuff as it was in those days of the Great War when we stepped forward as one coherent unit to accomplish the salvation of all that democracy holds dear. We know that the generation that suffered and bled and is yet paying for that War will not be needlessly led into another such mistaken solution of international rivalries. History tells us that every such lesson has been sufficient at least for the generation which experienced it. It is the education of the youth of this, and every other land, on which we must depend for sanity and wisdom in building up great social ideals which will make war a bloody outlaw instead of the glorious hero he looks in the past.

The creation of the appetite for this sort of altruistic social ideal has the same basic difficulty as that of creating an individual appetite for all true knowledge. The superficial variety of culture we are apparently getting to-day can almost be painted on with a brush. Radio broadcasting is a great universal mass tool for diffusion of entertainment and information. Its weakness as an educational tool lies in the fact that the student can turn off the bombardment with a simple twist of the wrist on the finding dial. It takes something more essential than an air filled full of invisible electric wavelets to create an appetite for sane ideals and true culture. That fact is also recognized among all educators to-day.